The essay is an attempt to make sense of the apparently special relation between self-knowledge and agency. To achieve that goal, the essay translates the account of what it is like to be a human self offered by Sartre into the language of evolutionary psychology. In L’être et le néant, Sartre describes the phenomenology of the self as a series of inescapable choices in a contingent set of circumstances. This essay identifies Sartre’s description with what Baumeister, Maranges and Sjåstad call a matrix of maybe: the mechanism of nonfactual pragmatic prospection found in humans. Consequently, it defines the self as a matrix of maybe operating within a contingency matrix and reflecting on its own operation. Self-knowledge, the essay concludes, seems special because we routinely and erroneously ascribe to the self features of its contingency matrix. Most of our true first-person claims should not be read as I PREDICATE. Instead, they can be explicated as I have to act in a world where C PREDICATE, where C is the relevant part of the contingency matrix.

This essay uses existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre to provide a philosophy of college piano performance teaching which includes awareness of freedom, abandonment and responsibility as a prerequisite for student-teacher interaction. To set the stage for the interaction the study uses Sartre's philosophy, illustrated with concrete examples from the world of piano teaching and performing, to describe what it means to be human. The author applies Sartre's writings about literature to support the idea of an engaged performance, relating it to existential psychoanalysis, making the performer and audience member realize freedom through choice, while addressing ideas of abandonment and performance anxiety. Sartre's philosophy is used to identify the roles both teachers and students play in the college environment as people and as performers. The study with the help of existentialism, describes the interaction between the different elements: teacher, student, performer, and human being, and provides a better understanding of the complexity of the pupil/professor relationship in the college piano performance program.